Ickler: What is beyond laughable

Friday

When I send a humorous email to someone and they respond “lol” I always wonder if they really are laughing out loud. I rarely go to that extreme over something I’ve read.

This past week, however, I really did “lol” when I saw a headline in the Boston Globe that said: “Trump believes he would rush in without gun.” When I recovered my aplomb, my first thought was that even Donald Trump would not do anything that stupid.

“I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” the Chief Tweeter said.

Really? Would he have run into Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shouting, “Make America Great Again,” expecting the madman to drop his assault rifle and clap his hands in applause the way the puppets in the Republican Party leadership do?

No one in law enforcement would ever be dumb enough to challenge an armed madman with nothing more powerful than a big mouth. And picturing an overweight blowhard in his 70s, whose bone spur kept him from carrying a gun in any kind of military service, running unarmed toward a stream of bullets being fired from a military weapon really did make me “lol.”

One thing that did not make me “lol” was the Chief Tweeter’s apparent endorsement of the National Rifle Association’s suggested method of preventing future school massacres: arming the teachers. Putting a gun into a classroom and expecting a teacher to win a shootout with a deranged man (all the shooters are men, and they aren’t migrants from Mexico or the countries the Chief Tweeter describes in a scatological way) carrying a rapid fire weapon meant for use in warfare is beyond laughable. I’ve read about a study showing that trained police officers firing their handguns under extreme duress only hit the target 13 percent of the time.

The thought of a gun in a classroom is downright scary. Suppose an angry student physically attacks the teacher (it happens) and the teacher pulls out the gun. Or what if an angry student gets the classroom gun and turns it on either the teacher or the other kids in the room?

What is also beyond laughable is the unhinged rant of NRA chief Wayne LaPierre in response to the Florida shooting. Never noted for understatement, LaPierre went completely bonkers, claiming that the Democratic Party is teeming with “saboteurs” and “socialists” who want to strip Americans of all their individual rights.

“You should be anxious and you should be frightened,” LaPierre said. “If they seize power, if these so-called European socialists take over the House and the Senate — and God forbid, they get the White House again — our American freedoms could be lost and our country could be changed forever.”

After a rip-roaring diatribe like that, it’s hard to remember that there are many good people in the NRA, some of whom have joined the effort to stop the mass slaughter of innocent people by gunfire. For example, men in Minnesota wore their blaze orange hunting apparel to a rally in St. Paul, where one of them said, “Hunters wear blaze orange so people don’t get shot. That’s what we want: that people don’t get shot.”

The NRA was once headed by a man who testified before Congress that he “never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons.” That testimony was given in the 1930s by Karl T. Frederick, who also said, “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

The NRA was founded in 1871 by Civil War veterans George Wood Wingate, a lawyer, and William Conant Church, a former New York Times reporter. Their primary concern had nothing to do with a civilian’s right to carry a gun.

According to a thesis written by a Naval Postgraduate School student, “Their personal disgust for the average soldier’s marksmanship skills during the war drove them to create an organization that promoted rifle shooting on a scientific basis.” Thus the NRA began as a promoter of marksmanship and organized shooting matches for training the New York National Guard. In other words, a training program for the “well regulated militia.”

Frederick became the NRA’s leader in the 1930s after winning three gold medals as an Olympic sharpshooter. He was a conservationist who fought to protect the Adirondacks and was president of the Camp Fire Club of America. He would have opposed everything the Chief Tweeter’s administration is doing to destroy our environmental regulations.

Frederick supported registering, taxing and severely restricting access to machine guns and sawed off shotguns, but had a more lenient attitude toward smaller guns, although he said he seldom carried one.

Until the 1970s, the NRA worked with the federal government on regulations, including after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In the late 1970s, a radical faction, including LaPierre, took control of the NRA and turned the organization into an unbending, inhumane opponent of gun regulations, even in the wake of repeated mass killings that have made our country the world’s leader in death by rapid gunfire.

Glenn Ickler of Hopedale is a retired newspaper editor.

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